Global Journalism

An Introduction

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, Michael Bromley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137604040
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350306547
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Providing a truly comprehensive overview of international journalism and global news reporting in the digital age, this new introductory textbook surveys the full variety of contexts that journalists around the world operate in; the challenges and pressures they face; their journalistic practices; and the wider theoretical and social implications. Analysing key scholarship in the field, Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova and Michael Bromley explore not just journalism as a single entity, but equally the multiple cultures which host journalism and the variety of journalisms which exist across the world. Clear and accessible, this is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of international and global journalism on journalism or media and communication studies degrees.

© Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova and Michael Bromley 2019

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova and Michael BromleyGlobal Journalismhttps://doi.org/10.26777/978-1-137-60405-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Global Journalism in the Digital Age:Key Concepts and Issues

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova¹ and Michael Bromley²

(1)

Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool Department of Communication and Media, LIVERPOOL, Merseyside, UK

(2)

City University London, Department of Journalism and Publishing City University London, London, UK

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Michael Bromley (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Global Journalism in the Digital Age: Key Concepts and Issues

Chapter overview

This chapter introduces the key topics covered in the book and the overall aims it serves. It is also a first attempt to identify the main issues facing global journalism at present and to define the book’s key terms and concepts. The chapter is structured around three main topics: (1) What is global journalism? (2) Key terms and developments in journalism (studies). (3) The future of journalism.

Learning outcomes

After having read this chapter you will be able to:

1. 1.
   Discuss what global journalism is and recognize the importance of context
2. 2.
   Identify some of the key terms used in journalism studies as well as recent developments in the field such as the proliferation of fake news
3. 3.
   Outline the main questions facing the future of journalism.

More than 68.5 million people were forced to flee their homes by the end of 2017 because of war and military conflicts. The United Nations (UN) announced in June 2017 that the number of refugees in the world had reached the highest level ever recorded and by June 2018 there were 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom were under the age of 18. In their pursuit of a better future, hundreds of thousands of people attempted to seek asylum in Europe. The UN Refugee Agency (2016) reported that between January 2015 and August 2016 an estimated 6,940 people had drowned or had gone missing while ‘trying to reach safety in Europe’. ‘On average 11 men, women and children have perished across Europe every single day over the last 12 months’ (UNHCR, 2016). The refugee crisis understandably attracted heightened media attention but the most iconic image was undoubtedly of a 3-year-oldboy who was found washed up on a beach in Turkey in September 2015. The family of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian of Kurdish origin, was trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea when their inflatable boat capsized. Aylan, his mother and brother drowned while his father survived. The photos of Aylan, shot by a Turkish journalist, reached the computer ‘screens of almost 20 million people across the world in the space of 12 hours and via thirty thousand tweets’ (D’Orazio, 2015, p. 12), and were headline news for numerous media outlets. D’Orazio (2015) claimed, however, that the story was not picked up by legacy media outside Turkey until five hours after it was first published.

Did the photos have a truly global reach (the world’s total population exceeded seven billion people), and were they eventually published by journalists from all continents? This question does not have an easy answer. Vis and Goriunova’s (2015) edited report suggested that the audience of the photos became ‘truly global’ only after the Washington Post Beirut bureau chief shared a tweet. However, the report indicated that nearly half of the shared images on social media were from accounts in Europe; 28 per cent from the US; 11 per cent from the Middle East and North Africa; 7 per cent from Asia; 2 per cent from Latin America, and 4 per cent from other locations. Why were Asian, African and Latin American journalists and audiences not as interested in the poignant photographs as their European and American colleagues? Did they actually see them? Can we realistically expect journalists and audiences in Africa to have picked up the photos, given that the internet penetration rate in 20 countries and territories on the continent was below 10 per cent (it was 35.2 per cent for Africa as a whole on 31 December 2017 according to Internet World Stats (2018))? Or could it be that those who saw the photos were actually interested in Aylan’s story but Western researchers had not really succeeded in capturing their reactions? While answering this question in full is beyond the scope of this book, we investigate some of the key factors that explain the global flows and contra-flows of news: namely, how news stories are produced and then disseminated not just within individual nation-states but also across borders, and more broadly how news flows globally. The example of the photos of Aylan clearly demonstrates the shifting dynamics in the ways news travels in the digital age, and the changing relationship between journalists and their audiences. More importantly, the differences in coverage and ‘shares’ illustrates the close interconnectedness between the relevant political, economic and cultural contexts and journalistic values and practices. The refugee crisis was dominating the news headlines in Europe for months, but did it feature at all in the news in other continents, and if it did, was that because people from these countries were directly affected by the refugee crisis or simply because journalists relied mainly on agency copy? We cannot fully understand what role journalists play in their societies and worldwide unless we ask these types of questions, which require us to take into account the broader context journalists work in and the range of factors that influence their work. The texts written by journalists cannot be isolated from the conditions in which they are produced.

As already indicated in the Preface, this appreciation of the importance of context is a core principle of this book, together with an attempt to avoid media- and Western-centrism. Media do not exist in a vacuum, and evaluating the factors and processes that influence the work of journalists is of crucial importance. All too often, however, when attempting to explain certain developments or how media messages are received by audiences, media and journalism scholars focus almost exclusively on the role of the media, thus often ignoring the importance of all other actors, factors and social structures that play a role in the process. Our aim is to avoid this trap of media-centrism. Similarly, while most of the theories used and the empirical contexts discussed in journalism textbooks are from the developed democracies of the West that have ‘free’ media, only 13 per cent of people in the world live in countries with media which are designated as free (Freedom House, 2017a).¹ Our aim, therefore, is to offer a comprehensive overview of the state of journalism around the world, not just Western countries, and of global news reporting in the digital age by also exploring the impact of a range of contributing factors – local, national, international and global.

What is ‘Global’ Journalism?

We have also been concerned particularly with what constitutes the ‘global’. At its simplest, the word means nothing more than ‘the whole world’. However, that implies crossing, if not ignoring, spatial and temporal boundaries, and navigating multiple cultures, established both naturally and by human activity. Thus, ‘global warming’ refers to overall climate change affecting the entire planet Earth, although it may manifest itself differently in different places. In journalism, one of the earliest uses of the concept of the global was in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’. McLuhan argued that the electronic media (especially television) provided instantaneous connections across time and space, and the sharing of the same information, as if we were all living in a village with face-to-face human contact (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967, p. 63). Even prior to that, the wire services (news agencies) – Reuters, Associated Press (AP), Havas and Wolff – were ‘global media organizations’ trading news across the world (Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, 1998, p. 1). Before the internet, television or radio, the telegraph (almost exclusively under British control with US support) formed a ‘global media system’ which linked the world with cables and later wireless radio telegraphy (Winseck & Pike, 2009, p. 34). These were building blocks in the construction of globalization in which all activities (political, economic, social and cultural) were potentially undertaken on a global scale. This implied three things: (1) the relegation of the distinctiveness of the national and the local, and, directly related to that, (2) linguistic domination and (3) the inbuilt advantage of more economically developed countries, such as the US and UK, in establishing global presences. However, notwithstanding the existence of large global news businesses, such as News Corp, or the domination of the World Wide Web by the English language, national and local media in many languages have proven to be quite resilient. In line with our desire not to see the global from a Western and Northern perspective we agree with Stevenson (1999, p. 4) who argued that globalization ‘has asked us to think again about projecting our own backyard onto the rest of the world’.

These developments impacted on journalism in four main ways:

1. 1.
   Journalists were part of an increasingly globalized labour force characterized by more flexible working, greater precarity of employment and off-shoring (Bromley et al., 2015, pp. 289–90; Bunce, 2010).
2. 2.
   Journalists’ work was more consciously directed at global users (for example, UK national newspapers the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday had print circulations largely confined to Britain of 1.5m and 1.375m respectively, whereas the MailOnline website with its global reach attracted close to 14m browsers).
3. 3.
   At the same time, journalists interpreted global events and issues for local users (their retreat from this led to anxieties over how ill-informed Americans were about the world, especially after the 9/11 attacks (Rash, 2011)).
4. 4.
   There was a residual corps of foreign correspondents reporting from one or more countries to another (home) country (see Chapter 5).

There has been a resurgence of interest in global/international journalism in recent years even as the numbers of foreign correspondents appeared to decline (Keller, 2013). A growing number of universities around the world offer postgraduate programmes and undergraduate courses/modules in both global and international journalism – from universities in the West which wish to expose students to diverse experiences to those in the global South which are looking to test Western models and evaluate their own indigenous practices. However, despite the increasing number of courses, there is no single overview that provides a comprehensive understanding of journalism within the context of media globalization in the digital era. A few texts on related topics have appeared in recent years but most tended to focus narrowly on specific topics and themes. On the one hand, some authors focused on the exceptional – the reporting of global crises and the role of foreign correspondents. Berglez (2013) structured his analysis around the notion of ‘global journalism’, defined as ‘a new form of journalism that is increasingly needed in global times’ (back cover), concentrating on the exceptional – the coverage of global crises. Cottle (2008) similarly offered insights into inter-national journalism which skirted its mundane existence. Williams (2011) and Owen and Purdey (2009) focused almost exclusively on the role of foreign correspondents. A few studies published (mainly) in the US concentrated predominantly on the mundane – the contexts in which journalists around the world work, organized by regions and/or countries (de Beer, 2008; Weaver & Willnat, 2012).

Global journalism concerns the routine as much as the exceptional – the comprehensive coverage of its mundane as well as exceptional aspects, features and processes. We broadly define the exceptional as the cover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Journalism – the Global North and the Global South
• 3. From the Ground Up: Theories of Global Journalism
• 4. Global Journalism Flows and Contra-Flows
• 5. The Evolution of Global Reporting
• 6. From Them to Us: Alternative and Citizen Journalism
• 7. Women and Journalism – A Global Transformation?
• 8. The Future of Global Journalism
• 9. Conclusion
• Backmatter